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Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Great Regulars: [Sarah] Manguso brings her own experience

with anxiety and depression--and with the potentially calamitous side effects of psychotropic medication--to bear on her friend's death. Intensely concerned with the various ways memories and feelings can be evoked through the artful manipulation of language, she explores the extent to which we are our friends' guardians and, in outliving them, the guardians of their memory.

Contrary to the blue-state view, it was in places like Boston, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia that DAs and local law enforcement lined up to throw the book at anyone who dared to cross the "obscenity" line. Yet in case after case, and with tremendous financial and civic courage, Grove Press pushed the cops and the courts to win freedom for writers to write what they wanted to write and for publishers to publish what readers were able to read. The gap between now and then makes it all the more difficult to appreciate just what Barney Rosset did in his time with Grove, the publishing house he purchased for $3,000 in 1951, when he was a restive 29-year-old trying to figure out what to do with his life.